15 St Catherine’s Street

• Lyons 1942-1944

• Izieu

February 9th 1943

“If it’s a Jew, you can do what you want”: Klaus Barbie to some SS soldiers trying to extract information from a presumed member of the Resistance at the Terminus hotel.

30 people were arrested by Klaus Barbie’s Gestapo, who personally supervised the roundups at the premises of the UGIF. The Gestapo hunted down all of its office workers, 86 people in total, almost all Jews with false papers who were subsequently deported to Drancy in the few hours following the roundup.
According to German intelligence that had led to the roundup, the committee of Saint Catherine’s Street had helped Jews to cross the Franco-Swiss border illegally, and were financed by the American association of Quakers (AFSC), and by Jews from France and Geneva.
In the German documents on this roundup it was stipulated that amongst the “men in the shadow of the committee” they had found Cardinal Gerlier and the Reverend Glasberg, the latter fleeing at the moment of the roundup.
The men and women arrested were in possession of money, foreign exchange and diamonds “that had been placed in safety…” During the roundup a man “was slightly injured by a bullet”.
They were all initially transferred to the Wehrmacht arrest house at Chalons-sur-Saone, but the prison was already full so they were taken to another camp, where they were “placed in two rooms at Fort Lamothe”.
Transferred on February 12th by train for Paris, at the moment of departure there were only 84 of them (60 men, 24 women; 15 of them were between 15 and 20 years of age), 2 of them having managed to escape that morning. The group arrived at Bercy station after more than 12 hours by train, and was taken to Drancy camp.
After examining the documents, Serge Klarsfeld concluded that the responsibility for this roundup laid entirely with the Lyons Gestapo, without any directive having been given on the matter to their chief, Klaus Barbie. Elsewhere we find his signature on two reports on the roundup dated February 11th.

If during his trial Barbie challenged the authenticity of these telex (the source is the CDJC), just as he did on the subject of the roundup of the Izieu children, Klarsfeld refutes this, using the same argument as Barbie.
Precisely because the documents come from the CDJC that contain the archives of the Jewish affairs department of the Lyons Gestapo, they cannot be challenged. Furthermore Klarsfeld adds that none of the nazis judged in Germany contested the documents provided as proof by the CDJC.

Furthermore, the description of the events of February 9th directly implicates Barbie. It seems that more than supervising, he also participated in the roundup. He apparently interrogated Jews who arrived at the UGIF on the spot, and one of them (Michel Kroskof-Thomas), arriving after the Gestapo at the premises, managed to pretend not to speak German and to have arrived here by mistake; pretending to be a painter and that he had a meeting and had simply arrived at the wrong office. After an hour’s interview with Barbie in front of a hundred people who had been arrested on that day (according to the testimony of Michel Kroskof), he was released by Barbie who was convinced by his story and false papers. He was then able to go to the cafes frequented by refugees in order to warn them and to organize the surveillance of the premises in order to prevent any more people from falling into the Gestapo’s trap.
But all day long the trap at 12 St Catherine’s street held more than one hundred people, as is confirmed by various testimonies, in spite of the efforts of those who rapidly managed to get freed and to warn the Jewish community in Lyons. Victor Szulklafer sent a coded telegram to the consistory of Nice and to warn them he stated: “Mr Shorban (Hebrew for misfortune) has arrived in Lyons, warn people.”
Jacqueline Rozenfarb, aged 14 at the time, managed to convince Barbie that she was not Jewish but French. Like all those who were freed by “the boss” that day she left the premises of the UGIF without her identity papers, which she was to pick up at the Terminus Hotel in Perrache the next morning. She went to the house of the parents of another young woman who was at Saint Catherine’s Street, where she met the Great Rabbi Kaplan, who was devastated by the news. Jacqueline had the good sense not to go to the hotel to claim her papers and that evening she and he mother left their home and moved address frequently.
Lea Katz, another survivor of the roundup explained that she had gone to the premises of the UGIF because the day before, during an identity check, she had heard that a roundup was going to take place at the synagogue at Quai Tilsitt the following Saturday. She therefore went to see the Great Rabbi to warn him but he advised her to go and warn the rabbi who would be on duty the next day. Rabbi Schonberg was meant to be at the premises of the UGIF, so she went there the next day.

arrested people on february, 9th 1943

Escaped